Chinese Catalpa Catalpa ovata
Chinese Catalpa is an introduced perennial tree, found in Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 49 ft.
More about this plant
Catalpa ovata, the yellow catalpa or Chinese catalpa, is a pod-bearing tree native to China. Compared to C. speciosa, it is much smaller, typically reaching heights between 20 and 30 feet. The inflorescences form 4–10-inch-long (100–250 mm) bunches of creamy white flowers with distinctly yellow tinging; individual flowers are about 1 inch (25 mm) wide. They bloom in July and August. The leaves are very similar in shape to those of Paulownia tomentosa, having three lobes, and are darkly green. Fruits are very narrow, foot-long pods. Wikipedia →
Chinese Catalpa is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 49 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~8 caterpillar species
Catalpa supports ~8 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Catalpa in North America, including:
Wildlife & visitors 4 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Chinese Catalpa — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
4 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Catalpa →
How we know this (4) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (21) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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